Do you notice true patterns in the zodiac personality signs?

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This is going to sound funny, but although I think of myself as a skeptic where zodiacs are concerned, my personal observations over many years nevertheless lead me to conclude that the personality signs (both Western and Chinese) have truth to them. (Where I don't see much truth is in any sort of predictions or forecasts...but here, I digress.)

When I think of all the people I know who are born under, say, the Chinese Snake sign, I truly do see the commonalities they all have: efficiency, a business-like attitude, high discipline, a tendency to like to suntan (absorb heat like real reptiles do).

When I think of all the people I know who are born under the Chinese Monkey sign, I do see their quirky, creative sense of humour, their egocentrism, their ability to grab attention at a social event, their intellectual craftiness.

When I think of all the people I know who are born under the Western sun signs (e.g. Scorpio, Aries, etc.), I see the patterns (Scorpio: intensity/secrecy, and Aries: hyperactivity/hastiness), and yes, they are real.

Maybe some of you will read this and say it's all nonsense. But if you are a pattern thinker and get what I'm saying, my question is - why does that stuff work? Seems like mythology on the surface, yet there's something in the universe that actually makes it all work. And even so, science would say it is all nonsense.

i'm a monkey and a wallflower.

"I'm a Sagittarius, the most philosophical of all the signs."

"But anyway, I don't believe in it. I think it's a bunch of bullsh^t."

- Jim Morrison

I'm going to say confirmation bias is the most likely explanation, but I'm not going to rule out a possible correlation. Aside from an actual mystical phenomena, I don't see anything which cycles every 12 years which could reinforce the chinese ones. Being born at different times of year could have an effect due to the different seasons, but I doubt it. I don't believe in the prophecies is prevalent enough for them to be self fulfilling prophecies.

This was my first thought as well. Of course, I wasn't even done with the first sentence when I had this thought, so perhaps the bias is mine.

Our brains, and as I understand it especially some of our brains, are experts at finding and categorizing information in our environment. A part of that is to seek ways to order the chaos that we encounter all day, every day. Unfortunately the chaos of personality cannot be so easily classified and ordered.

A person is far more than a loose collection of a handful of high-level traits. Stubbornness, creativity, etc. These are the same broad terms that an illusionist or mind-reader would use when convincing you they know you. In short, it is approximate to a parlor trick.

It's the fundamental premise of astrology which is flawed. Our constellations are nothing more than imaginary lines between objects of varying size, count (they're not always single-star systems) and distance relative to each other, and to us. The planets and stars involved are much too distant to have any meaningful effect on our brains or our memory formations.

In fact most of these same constellations are themselves recycled from older cultures, with new lines drawn between them to create more culturally relevant imagery. Even among modern cultures there are different names and shapes for some of them.

They appear to be no more relevant than we make them. It is our task to be aware that we have this innate desire inside us, this need to classify things so they fit together neatly, and recognize it when it crops up in systems that appear to be complex. It shouldn't always be ignored if you see patterns, but in this case there is volumes of material debunking the claims.

If you see a pattern, it is because your minds is looking for patterns and may often see patterns where no such pattern exists. The power of suggestion likely also is a major part of that.

There is no pattern.

Yes, it has truth to it - it must or it would be instantly seen as fraud.
A dictionary can be completely true without ever creating a sentence.

What Zodiac and others lack is usable specificity.

Aries - you generally have hands, but can get your nails dirty.
Taurus - you generally have feet but they may get stinky.
Gemini - you generally have a head and prefer a pillow of some sort when sleeping.
Cancer - you generally have eyeballs but may squint on bright days or around bright lights.
Leo - you generally have elbows but may need to eat regularly.
Virgo - you generally have kidneys but may dislike getting a severe sunburn.
Libra - you generally have food but can die without.
Scorpio - you generally have clothing of some type but it may often get dirty.
Sagittarius - you generally have ears but may dislike getting angry bees in them.
Capricornus - you generally have experienced animals but dislike getting bitten by them.
Aquarius - you generally have a mouth but it may need to be occasionally hydrated.
Pisces - you generally have toenails but may dislike having them pulled off with pliers.

These things are probably usually true for most everyone regardless of their birth-sign and the same is true for personality descriptors, but they are not specific enough to be useful.
Aries should avoid be shot in the head today.

But everybody should avoid being shot in the head every day, every night too, so this isn't really very helpful advice.

Part of the "trick" of these things is to distract a person from examining them too closely.
Usually people that are interested in these things are interested in self understanding or self improvement which is usually more than enough distraction to prevent skeptical analysis.

I'm a strong-believer in the zodiac signs.

I think they're all good fun, and I used to do astrological charts for people. I never take them seriously, though. Especially the sun signs, it's too broad to divide people into just 12 categories. And what are you supposed to do with preemies? I was born 6 weeks early and I don't fit either Gemini or Cancer.

I definitely agree that the pattern-seeking part of us looks for commonalities among people--heightened, I think, by the fact that we want to be able to understand others better. So that's why we turn to everything from astrology to psychology as a way of processing that. I was into astrology for a while as a teen; not only do we have our sun sign (birthday), we also have signs that govern how we interface with the world (rising sign) or our emotional selves(moon sign), etc. I can see why people might scoff at it, but I've found that there is a lot of truth to it as well (another pattern I've noticed among people with AS).

It's hard to say.

On one side, there is the power of suggestion. So, if you're exposed to a lot of information about the meaning of your "sun sign," it's a question of if you subconsciously emulate those traits or if they are genuine.

On the other side, if you were free of exposure and you still exhibit those traits, is it because of the influence of the stars or is it something to do with the environmental factors surrounding your birth and your first weeks outside the womb?

Some would say the occurrence of given traits among people born during a certain time of the year lends credibility to the claim, but again, you need a study of people's personality traits who have no knowledge of the zodiac or any of the beliefs surrounding it.

This is similar to a study to find what was considered "attractive" in women and the researchers had to go to a village in a jungle that had no mass-media (or any media) exposure to see if what they found in civilization was universal to human instinct or the product of what the media portrayed as "attractive."

I think it happened like this:

In the beginning, people had no accumulated knowledge and based their understanding on their immediate senses. There was darkness and chaos and it was nasty, mean, brutish and short.

Then came the word, and with the word, oral history and meaningful story. And the people were able to connect their experiences with those of their neighbors and even ancestors and the light of understanding began to flow into the world.

And they noticed patterns and compared the things they noticed and this resulted in farming and shepherding and grain storage and cities and metallurgy and (sometimes) civilization.

And it came to pass that some among the people were deeply interested in the nature of things. And those with sufficient wealth or patronage were able to devote their lives to learning and focus narrowly on the philosophy of nature. These were the first to use the power of the word to bring the light of understanding deep into things previously hidden.

Those who studied the stars organized their thinking into astrology, the words or telling of the stars. And the patterns they recorded were used and tested for millennia.

Along the way, some among the people noticed that the logos of the natural philosophers was not always reliable or helpful and they discovered patterns in the way that people might reliably investigate the knowledge of their senses, correct their tendency to record false patterns, and extend those senses with instruments of various kinds.

And they called the new kind of natural philosophy the art of knowing, or 'science.'

And the word of science was a very much brighter light than they had had before and very deep mysteries were revealed to all those who cared to look with precision.

And the word or logos of the stars, under the very bright light of science, was found to be full of both wisdom and error. The part that was found true was given a new name: astronomy. The part that was found false carried on with the old name: astrology.

Just the other day, the word that was true helped the natural philosophers of this time to identify the 1,008th, 1,009th and 1,010th planets orbiting distant suns.

The true word allows us to understand such wonders with extraordinary precision and detail. The old word is as confused, confusing and obscure as it ever was, even when the best minds of the people tried to make it work, and then made it into something better called astronomy.

This is the true word concerning the history of the knowledge of the suns and planets, as it was handed down to me by Carl Sagan and Patrick Moore, who carried with them the words of those who came before even to the days of old when darkness and chaos were on the minds of the people.

Here ends the testimony of Adamantium, humble and unworthy servant of the word.

Confirmation bias.

In the spirit of Adamantium's post, it would be easy enough to test with an experiment.


1) Correlate the Chinese and Western zodiac descriptions as closely as possible with Myers-Briggs profiles.

2)Have a set of subjects take the Myers Briggs test. Do not tell them about the zodiacal purpose. Get their birthdates.

3)Do their Myers Briggs profiles match what their birthdate zodiacs predict they would? Inevitably some will just by chance. Is the correlation greater than what chance would predict?


The influence of confirmation bias will cause people to pay attention to the times when chance alone causes the correlation while ignoring the times it doesn't. Some people who are Sagittarius and born in the Year of the Cat will behave just like the zodiacs predict they will, because with so few signs and so many people it is statistically inevitable. Confirmation bias causes those people to be focused on while those with behaviour that doesn't correlate are ignored.

Then there is behaviour variance within an individual. While people have an overall disposition that may or may not correlate with what is predicted by their birthdate, there will be growth, regression and just a general dynamism that makes it statistically likely that a given person will at least ocasionally behave in a way that correlates. Confirmation bias will make those times stand out if somebody is looking for a correlation.

The simple test conducted in my house every day:

My son and daughter are fraternal twins, born less than 1 minute apart. Their "astrological charts" are IDENTICAL. Sun, Moon, rising sign, conjunctions, houses... and yet they are very distinct personalities. No doubt a really dedicated person could find some way to force them into the same astrological pigeonhole, but only making the definition so vague as to be utterly meaningless.

Sorry, but no.

Except, I have no a lot of Leo and Aries... who... Never mind. Confirmation bias it is.

Confirmation bias seems reasonable in many cases. I've found myself absolutely certain that they were born under the sign of the Rooster, only to find later that it was some other sign. I've also been "surprised" to learn that someone might be a Rooster, when I didn't see the "signs" in their personality previously.

So yeah, that makes sense too.

Sometimes, reading about the sun signs reminds me of reading the DSM. After a while, it seems to get convoluted and confusing.

I thought I also read that the positions of the heavenly bodies have changed enough since the sun signs were created that people are really not the sign they think they are.